Mathematics Research, Education, and Sage

I think there is a brewing tension between education and research amongst developers involved with the Sage project. More on that in a moment.

I cannot speak for all the core Sage developers, but I think I have some idea what some of them think and care about. My impression is that many of them are involved in Sage because they want to create software that they can use for attacking cutting edge research problems in their research area. This is true of me: I started Sage -- original called "Software for Arithmetic
Geometry Experimentation" -- to have a very powerful open software environment for computing with modular forms, abelian varieties,
elliptic curves, and L-functions.

I am quite happy that Sage has become much more general, addressing a huge range of mathematics, since this expands the range of good developers and also increasing the range of tools math researchers can bring to bare on attacking a problem results in better research. For example, the solutions
to many problems in number theory involve an incredible range of techniques in different areas of mathematics. I'm fairly certain that many of the people who have put in insane hours during the last few years making Sage what is it now (e.g., Mike Hansen, David Roed, Robert Bradshaw, David Harvey, Robert Miller, Emily Kirkman, Martin Albrecht, Michael Abshoff, etc.) have a similar perspective.

On the other hand, I teach high school students for a while every summer (in SIMUW), as do other people like David Roe, and of course I teach undergraduate classes... This is why I put so much effort into co-authoring things like the Sage notebook, which exist mainly to make the functionality of Sage more accessible to a wider range of people.

So, I think there is a brewing tension between education and research amongst developers involved with the Sage project (and in my case in my own mind). Some observations:

1. The research part of the Sage project is thriving and getting sufficient funding independent of any connection with educational applications of Sage. It very very healthy right now.

2. There is a lot of potential benefit to education in having a tool like Sage, since Mathematica is quite expensive, closed, etc. It's good for humanity
for Sage to be genuinely useful in an educational context.

3. People working on Sage for research have very limited time, and it can be frustrating being regularly asked to do things by the education community that not only have nothing to do with research, but are even sometimes at odds with it.

4. It is vitally important for the Sage project to be both well organized and have a clear sense of direction, purpose and goals.

It might be a good idea if the people who are really interested in Sage being a great tool for *education*, would consider doing the
following:

(a) setting up a mailing list called sage-edu for development discussions related to Sage in education. I realize that we just got rid of sage-newbie, but that was for a different reason -- because people were posting sage-support questions there and not getting responses.

(b) Gather together the best education-related tools in some sort
of organized package. This could start with Geogebra. I don't know. The key
thing is that there is no expectation at all that the people into Sage mainly for research do much of anything related to this project. I hope one outcome of this project would be an spkg that when installed would make available lots of cool extra stuff, and of course I would be very supportive about server space, posting of spkg's etc. And when this gets some momentum and
quality behind it this spkg would be included standard in Sage.

Basically I'm suggesting that everyone interested in making Sage the ultimate educational tool get organized, figure out who really wants to put
in an insane amount of effort on this sort of thing, and put together a bunch of cool tools. Stop thinking you have to convince a bunch of us research-focused people to do the work or that your ideas are good -- you
don't -- your ideas are good; it's just that if we put a lot of time into them we won't have time for our research.

Make an spkg that will be trivial to install into Sage and extend its functionality. There is definitely sufficient interest in something like this
for education, there is great potential for funding, and potential for having a major positive impact on society. Thus I think people will emerge who will
want to take up this challenge. I just thing it's better if it can happen for a while unconstrained by the rules or prejudices of the "Sage Research" side
of this project.

In summary, please put a huge amount of effort into getting organized and putting together something polished and great, so I can later effortless assimilate it :-).